The keynote speaker for the event was Dr. Joy Crisp of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. She spoke about the Mars Rover project, and had some very interesting things to say about the evidence of liquid water they have found on Mars. After the talk, I even had the chance to talk with her. In fact, one other student from my school and I nearly monopolized all of her time.

We had our posters setup before the speach, so all we had to do was walk over and present. Basically, we stood next to our poster for 45 minutes (there were two "shifts" in this manner), and whomever wasn't presenting at that time/at all would walk around and ask questions. Dr. Crisp came by and asked all kinds of questions about my project, she seemed genuinely impressed.

I'm very happy with the event. Well, that's mostly because I got to try a real philly cheese steak for the first time, but the symposium was good too. I think I (as well as my fellow Shippensburg students) had one of the most original projects there. I know someone's project was "modelling the solar system in OpenGL and C++" and their abstract did not indicate how this was any different than what everyone does in Intro to Graphics. Someone else was doing some stuff with Normal Mapping. Their abstract made it sound like they were doing really revolutionary stuff, but I couldn't figure out how this was any different from Doom3, Far Cry, or Rainbow Six 3. I really wanted to go over to their posters and see what the big deal was, but I had people asking questions for the entire hour and a half for the posters (yes, that means I was presenting outside of the timespan I was expected).